Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

February 25, 2015

You've heard about the dark web - that deep undercover element which is full of illegal offerings, which has until now been really difficult to search. You needed to download and use the TOR browser which provides reasonable anonymity, and then hunt down the content that you're looking for. Well, there's a new resource available which is actually indexing pages and making them available as regular .html content. Because it's doing that, Google can now index them itself. Currently there's only about 650,000 pages, but I think you can rest assured that there will be more in the future. Simply get thee hence to Onion City and try it out. You'll actually find that you're searching a Google custom search engine, so if you prefer, you can go direct to Google and run a site search on site:onion.city for the same results.

Why would you want to find illegal, nefarious information? I have no real idea, but you might want to do it so that you know what's out there, how easy it is to find it, and what other people are doing. You may also be required to find out how much a fake passport costs, or if amphetamines are available online and if so, what they are.

You can simply go to the site and type in your search term(s):

Alternatively, simply go to Google and do a search for your search term(s) and add in site:onion.city and you'll get pretty much the same result.

February 05, 2015

I was asked the question " Is there any way to pull my photos from Twitter to my phone or drive or anywhere? Phone stolen and images lost!"

The first thing that I'd be inclined to do would be to visit Topsy.com and do a search for the users (ie. your) name, and then limit the search to images and choose 'all time' as a second option. This will pull up a lot of images - some that are linked to you, others that you have posted for yourself. Alternatively, go to Twitter's advanced search option, run a search for tweets from the @account and although you'll get everything, it should be possible to pull out the images that you need.

Alternatively, go to Google and do a search for site:twitter.com @username and then search in images. Again, you'll get a bunch of images that don't relate entirely, since they may be images from other tweets that reference you, but it's worth a go.

Once you have a page of images, it's going to be a pain to download them all one after another, so it might be worth trying a browser add on called Download Them All (search for the name and append your preferred browser to get a link) which may well let you just grab the lot quickly to enable you to go through them later. I've not tried this on a bunch of search results, but it may work.

February 02, 2015

One of the problems for Pinterest - if it can be called a 'problem' is that the demographic of its users is very biased towards women. As a result, it was quite difficult for the guys to find material that was appropriate or of interest to them - so I'm told. Pinterest has now taken matters into their own hands and it works on the gender that you have assigned yourself in the settings, so if you're a bloke you'll get to see more blokey things. An example is 'hair', and this screenshot should clarify matters for you:

I suppose that it's a good idea, but I'm uncomfortable with it. Suppose that I wanted to see hairstyles for women? How do I know which subjects have been given the 'men treatment' in the first place? Can I turn it off? I suppose I could go back and forth in settings to magically become a woman, but it's a bit of a drag (ooops, not intended, but I like it, so I'll keep it in) to have to do that. Alternatively I can do a search for 'hair women' but it's still a nuisance. It's a hard call either way. What do you think?

Google images have added in a bit of functionality that's quite helpful. When you run a search for images and click on one to view it, Google used to just give you a total of 8 options. Now you get seven, with the eight being a 'view more' option.

Fear of missing out, or FOMO as it's often referred to is the thing that people suffer from when they're not connected to the internet, and not looking at social media. It's otherwise referred to as 'having a life'. Now, some of us don't have lives, we spend all day on our computers keeping a check on what's going on, so we're not that bothered. However, for other people, keeping up to date with what's happening can be something of an issue. Fortunately Twitter is solving that with a new feature called 'While you were away' which they talk about on their blog. Basically it's a new heading that will appear on your iOS devices or web, with Android coming up shortly, and it will tell you about all of the interesting things that's happened while you've been busy having a life.

It's a great idea of course, but it's nothing new - for those of you who use clients instead of the Twitter native interface, you'll have discovered that you can create columns on places like Hootsuite for favourite search terms, references to you, to hashtags and so on, and all it takes is to start it up and take a quick peek. So well done Twitter - but what took you so long?

Nice meta search engine called eTools which I think is worth a minute of your time. As the domain implies, it's a European search engine, which is always a nice change, but it's mainly in English, so shouldn't be a problem. It searches Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, in total 16 different engines. Results are displayed in summary format with a preview and status box, but you can have the results broken down by topic, domain, and source. There's also a nice preferences option, links to other engines and the opportunity to weight particular search engines to really tailor the results to your liking. All in all, it seems to be a really nice search engine.